Removing a Virus from an External Hard Drive

If your external hard drive is infected with a virus, chances are that antivirus software – if it is installed on your computer – would detect the virus as soon as the hard drive is connected to your PC. If your antivirus program does not automatically scan the hard drive and detect the virus, you can do so manually.

To manually initialize the virus scanning process for an external hard drive (technically all the available volumes on the drive), you are required to right-click each volume individually and pick the scanning option from the context menu.

Note: Depending upon the vendor and version of the antivirus software that is installed on your PC, the available scanning option in the drives’ context menu and the opened interface when the scanning is initialized may vary. Nonetheless, the overall idea of scanning the volumes of an external hard drive remains the same.

Here is how you can scan and remove viruses from your external hard drive:

■Log on to your Windows PC. (Windows 8 in this demonstration.)
■Download and install any antivirus on your computer. (E.g. Avast antivirus in this demonstration.)
■Connect your external hard drive to your PC.
■Click the File Explorer icon from the taskbar at the bottom-left corner.
■From the This PC window, from the left pane, locate and right-click the external hard drive.
■From the displayed context menu, click Scan.



■Once the scanning process is complete, choose the appropriate action from the displayed interface to handle the detected viruses.
■After the viruses are removed or if no viruses were detected, close the antivirus window and start accessing the drive.